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Over the past few seasons, scary movies has often delved into toxic romance with the same intensity as a cursed dating app. Starting with engineered first encounters (New; Partner) to long-term codependence (Together) to the rare happy ending (Love-Struck), it's clear that romantic relationships are primarily blood-stained hell, and a pair traveling to a secluded location together signifies a fresh level of terror.

So it's not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her short vacation with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) at the beginning in the new and much-concealed scary film Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we discover quickly has marked the time Liz has fled past relationships. Still, she appears optimistic about this one. She believes she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their initial moments together are not as filled with warning signs or as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a cautious, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together way of speaking as he describes some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the reality that he has a eerie relative who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are well-matched. They seem at ease together.

The director brings in tension through his shot choices, instead of subtle hostilities or past events.

Liz and Malcolm's faces are rarely completely concealed, but they're frequently partially obscured, viewed from odd perspectives, or composed in shots with a unsettling amount of headroom. This establishes a pattern of disorientation that continues as Liz believes she perceives faint sounds through the house's air ducts. When she relaxes in the house's luxurious tub, there's an deeply memorable superimposition of the nearby stream flowing all around her, as if she's about to go beyond reality. "I feel like I took mushrooms," she tells a companion she calls when she's by herself at the cabin. Her acquaintance asks if she did mushrooms; Liz avoids responding straightforwardly.

Initially, Keeper – named for Liz's supposed status as the female in Malcolm's world – appears like it could head in any number of paths, its frightening components blended in a dreamlike mix. Is it a ghost story, a slasher-in-the-woods movie, or just a really bad experience? Perkins, a master of scares who has been on a prolific run for the past 18 months with an additional film scheduled next year, makes it difficult to discern, both within the story (so many of the most unsettling early moments are instances just blurry or in the periphery of the vision) and extra-textually; his last two films were the tonally distinct murderer thriller Longlegs and the fate-based scary humor The Monkey. This diversity, combined with Keeper's elusive and spoiler-averse ad campaign, could make the new film seem to some like a shell game designed to embellish what is, at its core, a pretty simple scary narrative.

Perhaps it's that. But part of what makes Perkins' film so refreshing is the way it prioritizes its visceral effect on an audience over a wish to twist that story into a modern relationship parable. As clever as so many contemporary horror movies are, they often script for theme instead of filming for immediacy. Consequently, some are starved for innovative visuals, surprising contrasts or a sense of authentic, uncanny enigma. Keeper has each of these, and Perkins understands just how much to push those elements without permitting the movie to become abstract mystical excess.

He also seems to know what a powerful grounding element he has in Maslany, who doesn't need to perform the typical masterful demo reel of a woman on the verge of doom. Liz becomes alarmed by the strange things that take place around her, and the role is scripted and performed with a certain straightforwardness. (She's not one of those scary movie leads who mysteriously sidesteps inquiring what the hell is going on.) Yet Maslany delivers a additional layer to her performance in her unprotected moments: a cynical flick of her gaze in one way or another, the fragility of her more courteous grins, the abbreviated of both her closeness and speed to irritation with her off-screen friend on the call. Though no specific skeleton key to her painful history awaits, the figure still seems complete.

The same applies of the film as a complete piece, too. It's not as rich as Sinners or as narratively ambitious as Weapons, two of 2025's standard-bearers for original horror. But when Keeper finishes up, its tight confines feel gratifying, appropriate and improbable to generate a follow-up. That tidiness emphasizes some of its themes in a manner that the more overt moralizing of other romantic nightmare tales do not always achieve: maybe it takes a fable-like horror for the complicated business of relationships to remain so perfectly contained.

• The film debuts in theaters on November 14th.